I've just abandoned IE7, mostly because it hates Quicktime and my university email software, and installed Mozilla Firefox instead. It works fine, but there are a couple of odd things I thought I'd mention. Firstly, despite being 'better' and 'faster' than IE, it's actually slower. EVERY page I go to opens noticeably slower than IE. And the other thing is that it doesn't seem to like the html code that Hotmail puts at the start of all of its emails. Rather than showing me the little toolbar it just shows a line of code instead. Is this just because Mr Zilla and Mr Gates don't get along? Oh yeah, and I just remembered, it scrolls down slower when I use the cursor keys. Can this be changed somewhere?

Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the north?
Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.

spithray wrote:I've just abandoned IE7, mostly because it hates Quicktime and my university email software, and installed Mozilla Firefox instead. It works fine, but there are a couple of odd things I thought I'd mention. Firstly, despite being 'better' and 'faster' than IE, it's actually slower. EVERY page I go to opens noticeably slower than IE. And the other thing is that it doesn't seem to like the html code that Hotmail puts at the start of all of its emails. Rather than showing me the little toolbar it just shows a line of code instead. Is this just because Mr Zilla and Mr Gates don't get along? Oh yeah, and I just remembered, it scrolls down slower when I use the cursor keys. Can this be changed somewhere?

I've imported my hotmail account into Windows Live and it worked very well in my Mozilla browser. That was just a test and I've since abandoned Windows Live. Depending on your operating system, you can use Outlook Express, or Outlook to view your account as well. I avoid going to the hotmail web page, but on the few occasions I have been there, Mr Zilla and Mr Gates seemed to be playing together well.

I've abandoned IE7 for exactly the same reasons you have and have not noticed any performance degradation in FireFox. The scrolling issue is a strange one. I've not heard of it before, so I don't know what to suggest there. If it were your mouse not scrolling fast enough, I'd send you to the control panel for the mouse. Settings for scrolling are often found there.

Sometimes anti-virus software works too well. Try turning it off for a while if you have it installed.

Also, while Firefox is excellent, Opera is as good if not better. Download it and evaluate it for your situation. You may like it enough to give up both IE and Firefox. http://www.opera.com/

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.

Cheers for the link Yogi. I tried Opera but it just seems a bit weird. There's no 'home' button and no easy way to access your favourite pages. As much as Firefox does some things that annoy me (like insist on saving downloaded exe files when all I want to do is run them from a temp folder), I'm sold on how little of the screen the toolbars take up even though I've got a line of my favourite pages one click away. And I downloaded the 1 click Answers thing which is quite cool.

Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the north?
Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.

The "Favorites" are called Bookmarks in Opera. They are part of the menu bar at the top. Go to the File menu and select "Import and Export" You will be able to automatically bring over all your bookmarks from your other browsers.

The "Home" button is a little trickier, but it is there too. Right click an empty space in the button bar, and select customize. Open the Button tab and you will find several categories of buttons you can add or delete. The "Home" button is under the Browser category.

Opera is highly customizable, much as is Firefox. The preferences may be in different places, but they are all there. The best feature of Opera is that it is highly compatible with the W3C standards for browsers. Sorry Kath, Firefox is close, but not quite as compliant.

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.

Well, it pains me to say this but, after much tinkering, I've gone back to IE. I can honestly say I've given the others a good chance but they just have niggly little things that don't seem to have a workaround, such as Firefox opening new tabs as blank pages, instead of duplicates of the page you are on.

Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the north?
Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.

What's so bad about IE? The reason I tried a couple of other browsers was because I'd heard people complaining about IE. It hadn't really caused me any major problems, just a couple of little things with university email and Quicktime; both avoidable. But the fact that both Firefox and Opera are a pain in the arse to set up was enough to put me off. And neither one of them loaded pages as fast as IE, and speed, to me, is very important.

Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the north?
Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.

That's an interesting observation about loading speed. I've found IE7 to be the slowest of the three browsers for pure download time. Perhaps it has something to do with the network or other settings you have in your computer.

The tabbed browsing in IE is a joke. If you don't need it then that won't bother you. As far as setting up the browsers go, yes, Microsoft might have an edge on the defaults they provide. However, there is nothing IE can do that Mozilla was not doing years ago. Plus there is a wealth of extensions available that have yet to be developed for the IE crowd. Again, if you don't have a need for bells and whistles, that will not be a detractor.

It really doesn't matter which browser you use, as long as you have no trouble navigating Brainformation.com

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.

Right, things have started getting a bit weird now. IE7 has started crashing every time I submit either a forum post or an e-mail, ever since Norton Antivirus 2006 went tits up a few days ago. I'm now using SuperAntiSpyware and AVG Free Edition instead of NAV2006, Spybot and AdAware 2007, and as far as I can tell, I'm infection free. However, I can get round this by going back to Mozilla, but Mozilla can't seem to cope with me using 2 wireless networks. The University network automatically diverts to its login page when you open your browser, whereas my home wireless just connects immediately cos its protected by a WPA key (or whatever they're called). But now Mozilla tries to connect to the university's login page even when I'm on my home network and therefore refuses to connect to the internet, and I can't seem to find anything relevant in the menus. Help!

Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the north?
Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.

Antivirus software is more of a pain than a help in my opinion. It's been more than seven years since I had any of it installed on my main desktop. However, I have been evaluating Avast anti-virus on one of our older computers and it seems to play very well with all the browsers and IM software I have installed. The reviewers tend to think Avast is better than AVG, so perhaps you can give it a try before you lose faith in IE7 altogether.

The browser per se has no sense of what network you are using. It merely tries to download whatever home page you point to. Of course, the network home page will not work at home because you are not using the university network, and the homepage is not available. Likewise, when at school you may be restricted (by the network administrators) as to what connections you can make beyond the proxy.

The solution would be to pick a "neutral" home page, perhaps the BBC or some other site outside the school's network, which is allowed to be accessed from inside. The better solution would be to pick something resident on your personal computer as the home page. You can create your own, or simply point the browser to a directory ("My Documents" for example), and use that as your home page.

The down side, of course, is that when you decide upon a neutral home page, you will then have to switch over to where you want to be. It's an extra step in the boot process, but that is what bookmarks and favorites are for.

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.

Yogi: <i>"The better solution would be to pick something resident on your personal computer as the home page. You can create your own, or simply point the browser to a directory ("My Documents" for example), and use that as your home page."</i>

Which leads to a pretty good idea:

In IE7, select "Add to Favorites" button, then in the drop down menu, select "Import and Export..." This will bring up the import/export wizard. Go through the wizard (likely you will just punch through, since you want to save <i>all</i> your bookmarks in an HTML file). Once you have saved the favorites file, you can point your browsers homepage (<i>whatever</i> browser you want to use) to the HTML file you've just saved. When you launch your browser, up will come your bookmark file, and you can select whatever page you want to go to from there.